Archive - May 2005

A while back I finished a great book on problem solving (and ideas) called Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small. (There's also a website called Why Not Open Source Movement.) I wanted to post my notes from the book, summarizing their points. If you think these are interesting, I urge you to buy the book. I found it a great resource.

The authors present two basic idea-generating methods, and four problems-solving tools:

1. Problems in search of solutions
   
   1. What would Croesus do (WWCD)? (UNCONSTRAINED CONSUMER)
      
   2. Why don't you feel my pain (INTERNALIZATION)?

2. Solutions in search of problems
   
   1. Where else would it work (TRANSLATION)?

The problem: Data is still frequently transmitted as semi-structured ASCII text, but applications require structured information. For example, I often want to input an address into an electronic address book based on text from an email or web page, esp. a signature. (Yes, there's vCard, but I think consistent usage is still rare, and using it requires extra steps.) Another example is inputting financial transactions into a finance program from an on-line banking page - I now do much of my bill paying on-line using a web interface from my bank, and I hate having to laboriously (and erroneously) copy each section of the transaction's output (HTML) into GNUCash.